Accelerators

A cooperative agreement with Palo-Alto based CPI opens the door to routine commercial manufacturing of these powerful vacuum tube devices, which convert electron beams into microwaves that are used to accelerate subatomic particles.

Growing up in China shortly after the Cultural Revolution, Zhirong Huang may have been the only middle-school child in Beijing who knew anything about SLAC. Today he’s a notable innovator in the design of particle accelerators and free-electron lasers.

In a SLAC test facility, scientists have set the stage for an experiment that mimics what happens when incredibly energetic cosmic ray particles hit our atmosphere. While the experiment is part of ANITA, which sends balloon-borne instruments into the upper atmosphere, the results could benefit a broad range of other experiments.

In an advance that could dramatically shrink particle accelerators for science and medicine, researchers used a laser to accelerate electrons at a rate 10 times higher than conventional technology in a nanostructured glass chip smaller than a grain of rice.

Scientists at SLAC have found a new method to create coherent beams of twisted light – light that spirals around a central axis as it travels. It has the potential to generate twisted light in shorter pulses, higher intensities and a much wider range of wavelengths, including X-rays, than is currently possible.

Last Saturday marked the 40th anniversary of an historic event: In 1973, a team of research pioneers extracted hard X-rays for the first time from SLAC's SPEAR accelerator. Like X-rays from an X-ray tube, the radiation generated by SPEAR can deeply penetrate a large variety of materials and probe their inner structures. However, SPEAR's X-rays are significantly more intense and unlock the possibility for brand new science.

In 1971, physicist Burton Richter of Stanford Linear Accelerator Center was building a new type of particle collider called a storage ring. The lab’s two-mile-long linear accelerator—housed in what was then the longest building in the world—would shoot electrons and their antimatter twins, called positrons, into the 80-meter-diameter Stanford Positron Electron Accelerating Ring, and SPEAR would set the beams of particles on a collision course. Richter and his colleagues stood by to examine the debris to see what discoveries came out.